What Happened: August 25, 2021

The Big Story

Unable to get accurate information in Washington, D.C., on the situation in Afghanistan, two congressmen decided to go and see for themselves. After taking an unauthorized surprise trip to the Kabul airport and observing evacuation operations on the ground, Reps. Peter Meijer (R-MI) and Seth Moulton (D-MA), both military veterans who served in the Iraq War, now say that “no matter what we do, we won’t get everyone out on time.” “On time” refers to the Biden administration’s deadline of Sept. 11. By “everyone,” they appear to mean both American citizens trapped in the country and Afghans who have applied for special visas to come to the United States. President Biden said Tuesday that he is sticking to his deadline to complete the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan next week.

The congressmen arrived at the Kabul airport on Tuesday, earning immediate reprimands from the Pentagon and congressional leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A military spokesman accused them of diverting critical resources. But in a statement, the pair pointed to their “duty to provide oversight on the executive branch.” Evidence for the lack of such oversight can be seen in the reports coming from Afghanistan that routinely contradict key claims from the White House. Echoing a point he made last week when he spoke exclusively with The Scroll, Meijer said that information coming from the White House “has lagged by days what’s on Twitter.” While the administration has claimed that Americans in Kabul were having no problems reaching the airport, on Monday the military acknowledged that it had carried out a series of emergency extractions, including airlifting 169 Americans from a hotel only 200 meters away from the airport.

Read more here: https://apnews.com/article/business-evacuations-kabul-islamic-state-group-9aa28ed934ac7a00e5982dafeab84c84

And click here to read The Scroll’s recent interview with Rep. Meijer: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/the-scroll/articles/the-scroll-today-afternoon-news-digest-daily-081921

The Back Pages: Michael Tracey on What the Media Hasn’t Told You About the Cuomo Debacle

The Rest

- The White House still won’t disclose how many U.S. citizens remain in Afghanistan, but a leaked State Department cable reported by Politico’s Alex Ward breaks down the numbers and background of people leaving the Taliban-controlled country. At the Washington Examiner, Byron York summarizes, “As it stands, it appears that U.S. planes evacuate about five Afghans for every one American.” What’s driving that policy? The White House isn’t saying. Read it here:https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-who-are-we-bringing-out-of-afghanistan

- The goalposts keep moving in the elusive post-COVID-19 “return to normalcy.” The White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci now says that we might get back to normal by Spring of 2022 but suggests that will require vaccine mandates. Now that COVID-19 vaccines are receiving approval from the Food and Drug Administration, “you’re going to see a lot more mandates,” Fauci said in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday, “because there will be institutions and organizations which previously were reluctant to require vaccinations, which will now feel much more empowered to do that.” On Monday, President Biden urged companies to “do what I did last month. Require your employees to get vaccinated or face strict requirements.”

- In between calls for vaccine mandates and assurances that the United States might get back to normal someday, Anthony Fauci endorsed monoclonal antibody treatments Tuesday as an effective early stage COVID-19 treatment. If used early enough, the treatments can reduce the chance of a severe illness by 70% to 85%, Fauci said. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has been aggressively pushing the treatments. “Every Floridian across our state should have access to monoclonal antibodies—because early treatment saves lives,” DeSantis said last week.

- Larry Harlow, a salsa pioneer known to his Spanish-speaking audiences as El Judío Maravilloso, the Marvelous Jew, died on Friday at age 82.
Read about him here:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/arts/music/larry-harlow-salsa.html

- The Big Apple is back on top, baby! New York’s rents are once again the highest in the country, knocking San Francisco out of the top spot. A study by Zumper, an online platform for rental searches, puts the median price of a one-bedroom in New York at $2,810, compared to $2,800 in Frisco.

- It used to be paranoid anti-government types who were into investigating unidentified flying objects, but now it’s members of Congress. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is putting provisions in next year’s Intelligence Authorization Act that directs further research into the UFO phenomenon. A real conspiracy theorist may wonder if this new era of officially sanctioned UFO investigations isn’t an attempt to deflect attention from the all-too-human corruption and malfeasance here on earth.
Read it here: ​​https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2021/08/senators-look-continue-government-led-research-strange-ufo-sightings/184814/

- Dell and Sonya Curry are divorcing after 33 years of marriage. The parents of two NBA stars, three-time champion Steph Curry of the Warriors and Seth Curry of the 76ers, met at Virginia Tech. The former spouses each accuse the other of cheating.

- Do you, a happily married person whose mind can’t help but drift sometimes, ever fantasize about how exciting single life could be? Don’t be fooled! It’s a mirage. Listen to this guy:

You think it’s something better...I come to let you know... The best you gonna get is what you already got

— Soaking 🤌🏿 (@solomonmissouri) August 23, 2021

- The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a ruling requiring the Biden administration to reinstate President Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, by a vote of 6-3. The policy requires asylum seekers to remain in Mexico pending the outcome of their requests to enter the United States.

- Just like in Total Recall, a science fiction movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger about how great the future is and how there’s nothing to fear from new technologies, the city of San Francisco now has self-driving robot taxis. The vehicles are a product of Waymo, a Google subsidiary specializing in self-driving cars. For now, the cars—which have already been in use in Phoenix since last fall—are required to have a human “safety driver” riding along.
Read it here:https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/24/waymo-launches-robotaxi-service-in-san-francisco/

The Back Pages

On August 9, The Scroll published an article by Michael Tracey that asked: “What Exactly Is Andrew Cuomo Guilty Of?” Tracey later self-published a follow-up, “What the Media Hasn’t Told You About the Cuomo Debacle,” an excerpt from which is republished here with permission.


If you’re done basking in the schadenfreude, it may be time to honestly consider the implications of Andrew Cuomo’s ouster this week.

Many online commenters have expressed their opinion that Cuomo deserved to be ousted for his March 2020 order involving nursing homes, which is believed to have resulted in unnecessary COVID-19 deaths. Oddly enough, the people furiously hammering this point tend to be the same people who’ve opposed most (if not all) COVID-19 mitigation measures, and generally exhibit an attitude of dismissiveness toward COVID-19’s severity. Nonetheless, they’re extremely incensed about this particular issue of hospital administration policy.

OK, fine. As a thought exercise, let’s just assume that these nursing-home-related criticisms of Cuomo are in good faith and that his March 2020 order has been empirically established to have caused excess deaths. (Whatever the precise epidemiological consequences of the order, it’s not in dispute that the state government at Cuomo’s direction subsequently withheld much of the pertinent data.)

Any way you want to slice it, though, the nursing home / COVID-19 controversy is patently not why Cuomo was bludgeoned into submission and resigned this week. That was a controversy he evidently believed could be withstood. His most stalwart political allies did not abandon him due to the nursing home matter. They abandoned him because a successful PR and quasi-legal campaign was mounted to tar Cuomo as a serial sexual abuser, and this campaign achieved its intended result with brutal efficiency.

For the time being, try to forget the name “Cuomo.” Try to imagine what your reaction would be if the following happened in the abstract:

• A politician running for elected office decides to launch a series of conspicuously vague “harassment” accusations on Twitter, but rather than critically scrutinizing the political motivations which may have given rise to such a tactic, the politician is portrayed merely as a generic “accuser” who just benignly materialized out of thin air.
• That politician then communicates (and, seemingly, coordinates) with another “accuser,” whose central accusation is that she was “groomed” not as a helpless child, but as an adult political operative in her mid-twenties. Nonetheless, this second “accusation” gives the impression that “accusers” were beginning to snowball, and “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” etc. The new “accuser” also happens to be a professional activist. (SEE BELOW FOR MORE…)
• Soon thereafter, yet another “accuser” emerges, furthering the impression that a critical mass has been reached. But something’s odd. This new accuser’s accusation is that a photo she’d proudly displayed in her own office for years was retroactive evidence of abusive conduct.
• These individuals’ accusations were sufficient to create such a condemnatory climate that the accused acceded to an “independent” investigation of himself, overseen by the state’s chief law enforcement official.
• The state’s chief law enforcement official, announcing her findings, accuses the subject of the investigation of violating multiple state and federal laws, but—in a move that upends every previously-existing assumption about due process—then announces she will take no commensurate prosecutorial action, thus providing no venue for any formal cross-examination or rebuttal. Though operating under the auspices of law, she instead is content to just declare that the law had been violated, and issue a kind of newly invented political indictment.
• Virtually no one in the media/political class sees anything disconcerting about any of this, and the accused’s support appears to evaporate in a matter of days. The consensus is that he must go, so he goes. Career over!

That just scratches the surface of this ordeal. Chronicling your “disgraceful” downfall, The New York Times then runs a headline declaring you a serial sexual assaulter, proclaiming it’s been “concluded” that you’ve physically victimized at least 11 separate women:

Even though ... that’s not remotely what happened.

Again, your personal feelings about Cuomo in relation to any other aspect of his governorship, ideology, temperament, etc. has no bearing at all on whether it’s factually true that he was accused of “sexually assaulting” 11 women. He was not. The Attorney General’s report which precipitated his downfall does not allege that Cuomo sexually assaulted 11 women. Included among that tally of 11 are women who allege, for instance, that Cuomo committed such infractions as using comical terminology like “mingle mamas.” Another person complained about his telling her that she made wearing an elaborate “Personal Protective Gear” gown “look good”—at a public COVID-19 press conference. Charlotte Bennett, an accuser described in further detail below, admitted that Cuomo never attempted to physically touch her ...


Read the rest of the article at Michael Tracey’s substack: https://mtracey.substack.com/p/what-the-media-hasnt-told-you-about